New York City schools reopened Monday to scenes of joy, relief and anxiety as about a million children returned to their classrooms, most for the first time since the country’s largest school system closed in March 2020 due to the pandemic.
The day, always chaotic even in normal times, began with many families and educators nervous for the coming months, as the spread of the highly contagious variant of the Delta has complicated the city’s drive to completely reopen schools.
It represents a crucial moment in the city’s long-running recovery from the pandemic, and Mayor Bill de Blasio has a lot at stake in keeping schools open, even when other districts in the country have faced quarantine and other alterations. Unlike last year, and unlike other major urban districts, the city did not offer any remote options to most students.
It is unclear how many parents will keep their children at home, at least initially. Last year, 600,000 children were enrolled in remote learning, and while the vast majority of those children appeared to have returned to school on Monday, a small group of parents have asked the city to resume schooling. online classes.
Mr. Blasio said he believed almost all students would eventually return. Meisha Porter, the chancellor of schools, said last week that the Child Services Administration could be involved if families refuse to send their children after several weeks.
The city’s preliminary attendance rate on Monday was just over 82 percent, but did not include the amounts of approximately 350 of some 1,800 schools. This rate was lower than in previous years, but not dramatically: attendance on the first day of the last pre-pandemic years was around 90%.
The mayor said Monday would be remembered as “a game changer, a differential, a day of change” for New York City.
Most parents agreed it was time to go back. In Brownsville, Brooklyn, Debra Gray left her 13-year-old son Kamari, who has asthma, nervous at public school 323. “We have to give her a chance,” she said. “Children need time with their teachers. But I’m worried. “
To assure parents that their children are returning to safe classrooms, city officials have implemented policies that include randomized testing, immunization mandates for school staff, and quarantines for unvaccinated students. All students, teachers and staff members must wear masks inside schools.
But for all planning, the online health screening survey that parents must complete each morning temporarily crashed when hundreds of thousands of people logged in simultaneously.
Still, the day passed with few major problems. Across the city, students expressed excitement and uncertainty for the new year.
In a broken air-conditioned subway car in East New York, Brooklyn, 8-year-old Neriyah Smith said she was nervous and excited to see her classmates again after learning at a distance during all last year. “I made a lot of friends before I used computers,” he said.
In the Bronx, 14-year-old Jazlynn Gonzalez hugged and looked with open eyes at the students pouring into Herbert H. Lehman High School. “Ooh, I’m so scared,” he said. “I don’t know what to do, like people are approaching me and I don’t know if I should say hello, it just confuses me.”
New York, which always begins and ends its school year later than most other districts, is the last major system in the country to reopen. Los Angeles and San Francisco have seen very few outbreaks in the weeks schools have opened, while other districts that do not require masks or other safety measures have experienced massive quarantines of students. In Mississippi, for example, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country, there were 69 outbreaks in schools in the first few weeks of classes.
Mr Blasio has long said the city, once the epicenter of the pandemic, could not fully recover without the complete restoration of its school system, which will allow many parents to return to work. In fact, there are encouraging signs: the city’s Delta wave, which was modest compared to much of the rest of the country, seems to be spreading just as the school year begins.
Monday’s reopening limited the months of planning and anticipation for the third consecutive school year, altered by the pandemic.
In May, amid a rapid launch of vaccines and a rapid decline in the number of virus cases, Mr. Blasio announced that the city would no longer offer remote instructions to most students. (A few thousand children the city considers medically vulnerable will be able to learn from home.)
Her announcement sparked little political resistance in the spring, but her administration has faced growing pressure from parents and politicians to reconsider. Some parents said it on Twitter they kept their children at home Monday as part of a protest against the decision not to offer a remote learning option, but it is unclear whether that protest will last beyond this week.
Many of the mostly Latino and black families who kept their children learning from home last year have returned to the buildings. But some say they would have preferred to wait at least until their young children could receive the vaccine. Currently, only children 12 years of age or older are eligible and younger children are not expected to be eligible until at least the end of this year.
Mr Blasio has said the city is not considering forcing the shooting on eligible children, as Los Angeles has done.
But New York has gone beyond most districts in the country by implementing a full vaccination mandate for all of its educators, along with all the adults working in school buildings.
The stakes are huge for the hundreds of thousands of children in the city who have not seen their classmates and teachers since the beginning of the pandemic.
In the Bronx, Jazlynn said her nerves from the first day of school were more than making the leap from high school to high school – it was about re-learning how to go to school. “I used to be very talkative with people, but now I keep my distance and now I’m quiet, that’s what makes me most nervous,” he said.
Standing at Bayside High School in Queens, 14-year-old Nate Hernandez, a freshman, said he was thrilled to be back.
Online classes made him feel “a little sad and a little lonely,” he said, adding, “It was hard to meet people.” But now, Nate said, “I can’t believe I got to ninth grade, in high school. I say to myself, “Now I’m going to high school.” It’s crazy.”
Nailah Frederick, a 15-year-old sophomore at Bayside, said she had received A grades for her work until the pandemic began.
“I can’t learn online,” he said, adding, “I didn’t think my first year of high school would be like this. I missed looking around a class and having people there around me.”
The mayor has remained determined to make the school year go smoothly, although security measures have been put in place. But it is still possible that a significant transmission to the school this fall could force the temporary closure of many school buildings, or even the entire system.
Schools in the city experienced remarkably low virus transmission to their buildings last year, but most schools had significantly reduced capacity. Still, even with a low transmission rate late last year, quarantines remained a common occurrence.
The city’s recently announced quarantine policy will certainly lead to frequent short-term classroom closures, especially for younger children.
In primary schools, where children are still too young to be vaccinated, a positive case in the classroom will result in a 10-day quarantine and a change in remote learning for the entire classroom.
In middle and high schools, only unvaccinated students will have to quarantine if they are exposed to someone with the virus, which means unvaccinated students could have a very different school year from their vaccinated classmates. More than 60 percent of New York City’s vaccine-eligible children have received at least one dose, but the city doesn’t know how many of those children attend their public schools.
While the city’s quarantine protocol is more conservative than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends, New York’s school testing plan is less stringent than the CDC calls for, alarming some parents and public health experts. .
A random sample of 10 percent of unvaccinated students whose families consent to take tests will be done at each school every two weeks; the city did weekly tests on 20 percent of people in all school buildings late last year.
Testing will begin this week. Asked on Monday about the city’s testing protocols, Mr Blasio said schools could increase testing if necessary.
The city’s modest testing program has unsettled many educators, including the thousands of teachers who received medical exemptions for distance work last year. But on Monday, all the educators returned to the school buildings.
Justin Chapura, who teaches English as a second language at Bronx River High School, said he was nervous and had trouble sleeping before starting school. But he was very happy to see students he hadn’t seen since March 2020, some of whom had experienced significant growth.
“There are a million things going through my head: do I have everything ready?” Said Mr. Chapura. “Have I made all my copies? What is my first class? What is my second class? Where is my lunch? What is happening? Do I have my coffee? I ordered coffee in the taxi on the way here;
Emma Goldberg, Chelsia Rose Marcius and Nate Schweber contributed.